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Free NVIDIA Fermi Cards To Open-Source Developers

04-26-2010, 02:00 PM

Phoronix: Free NVIDIA Fermi Cards To Open-Source Developers

Prior to launching their next-generation graphics processors, NVIDIA dropped their obfuscated open-source driver and have said they will not provide any open-source support at all for their GeForce GTX 400 "Fermi" series as they just recommended their customers use the X.Org VESA driver until they can install the official binary Linux driver. However, the community developers working on the Nouveau driver project still plan to support the GeForce GTX 470/480 graphics cards via clean-room reverse engineering. Today their efforts might be helped thanks to a hardware sponsorship...

...as the Mesa/Gallium3D stack is still trying to catch-up to the OpenGL 3.0/3.1/3.2 specifications.

And I hope OpenGL 3.3 too.
Also, I hope PathScale won't be handing out free video-cards to anyone who claims he's a open-source (GPU) developer without checking that info first as otherwise the freeloaders would be the first to benefit.

Comment

Must be PathScale sees open Linux drivers as beneficial to them even though nVidia themselves do not. Companies rarely do charity.

Companies frequently do charity, but the lack of visibility could sometimes lead those not looking in the right places to miss it. Regardless of that I will say there's strong benefit to us and hopefully everyone with Nvidia hardware for what we're trying to accomplish. We realize these cards are relatively expensive still and that getting them in the hands of eager developers could help bolster work for not only Fermi but all Nvidia cards. I should also note that we have pre-alpha compute drivers for OpenSolaris and FreeBSD. Our focus is open source and not just Linux. Open source drivers may not drive revenue, but I think it'll help us deliver a higher quality product. Mostly, I'm just sick of my Nvidia drivers crashing on OpenSolaris and can't wait to send a patch to fix it (jk)

Comment

Companies frequently do charity, but the lack of visibility could sometimes lead those not looking in the right places to miss it.

That, and a tendency of many to see corporate charity as nothing but an attempt to buy good press.

Which may often be true, but those people forget that corporations are run by humans, who may have genuinely charitable reasons for what they do. It's not *always* a cynical attempt to exploit the masses...